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Vanities, and Hungry New Yorkers

At Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger, demand has increased significantly.Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

This past week the New York Public Library acquired the papers of Tom Wolfe for the sum of $2.15 million. The material, which fills about 190 boxes and includes correspondence between Mr. Wolfe and his tailor, was paid for largely with a private donation, and while the figure is hardly exorbitant in the realm of cultural philanthropy, which vastly outpaces social-service philanthropy, it represents more than twice the amount of the biggest gift ever made by an individual to the Food Bank for New York City. The all too obvious irony is that it is just this sort of fracture in the city’s psychology that might find trenchant expression in a piece of writing by Tom Wolfe.

While it arguably strains fairness to impugn the generosity of New Yorkers, who demonstrate exceeding largess, charity here is more closely tied to self-promotion than to the anonymous doing of good works. Although it is one of the largest food banks in the country, supplying food to more than 1,000 pantries and soup kitchens, and although it has been in existence for three decades, the Food Bank received its first $1 million donation from a private citizen only two years ago, and it came from a foreigner who had moved here and become appalled at how little the affluent classes seemed to understand problems of native poverty and hunger.

There is virtually no more immediate way to affect the lives of the poor than to give to the agencies that help feed them, especially now when need has so greatly escalated. As a result of cuts to SNAP, the federal food stamp program, which went into effect on Nov. 1 (and precede further potential reductions of $4 billion to $40 billion), food pantries are already experiencing mounting burdens. One of the city’s largest, the Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger in Brooklyn, has seen more than a one-third increase this month in the number of people coming in, compared with November of last year. Another, the New York Common Pantry in East Harlem, was seeing a 25 percent rise during the five months before the cuts.

Even before the cuts went into effect, matching supply with demand presented wounding challenges. According to a study of emergency food program participation released by the Food Bank last month, there are 100,000 more New Yorkers relying on these services today than six years ago, while there are fewer pantries to serve them. In another sign of distress, the term “emergency” now seems misapplied.

When the Food Bank was created in 1983, its founders foresaw a life span of merely a decade or so, in which the organization would primarily serve homeless men. Instead it functions today largely to assist working families, Margarette Purvis, its president, said, and 60 percent of those surveyed for the Food Bank’s study reported that they had been coming to a particular soup kitchen or pantry for more than a year. This notion that hunger has come to exist as the status quo is reflected in a 2010 analysis conducted by the national organization Feeding America, which supplies food to local food banks. The study revealed that the majority of clients in the group’s network were visiting food pantries not for temporary assistance but for continuing sustenance.

And sustenance is broadly defined. If you visit the New York Common Pantry on a Wednesday morning, you are quite likely to find men lined up for haircuts, as pantries find themselves forced to evolve into purveyors of more than groceries and sandwiches. The poor have come to depend on pantries for diapers, shampoo, paper towels, toothpaste — the sorts of products that are costly, necessary and typically not covered by food stamps.

What further complicates matters in the world of food relief is the increased complexity of sourcing. In the early days of food pantries, much of what came in arrived in the form of canned goods, but the country’s growing investment in nutrition has meant that relief groups strive to supply more fresh fruits and vegetables now, which requires them to incur greater costs of refrigeration. At the same time, the buying patterns of grocers have become ever more sophisticated, meaning that they can more closely predict the number of pears, for instance, that they can sell, leaving less overstock available for donation. (At the Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger, “the produce coming in is at compost level,” Melanie Samuels, its executive director, said, which isn’t entirely useless because the organization runs an urban farm.)

Another trend that has developed over the past decade is the diversion of food to secondary markets. Food close to its expiration date, which otherwise might have found its way to a food bank or pantry, is now sold to dollar stores or countries where regulation may be less stringent.

In this country at this time of year, many of us are called to the food drive, the ritual of delivering canned cranberries, or turkeys or breads to a designated location from which they must be transported to a warehouse and then sorted, edited and so on. This, too, isn’t quite as simple as it may seem, presenting the problem of what Ms. Purvis calls “high touch,” the involvement of too many hands driving up costs and reducing efficiency.

As it happens, there is little to surpass the efficiency of money. While it may feel more intimately virtuous, more morally instructive, to tell a small child that you’ll be packing up food for the needy and taking it to school, it may ultimately be more effective just to have that child sit and watch you write a check.

EMAIL: bigcity@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on November 24, 2013, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: Vanities, and Hungry New Yorkers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe